Hacker News: laffOr

New comment by laffOr in "European AI. A playbook to own it"

laffOr — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 09:05:58 +0000

Is really a compete XOR lobby the government? The AI companies in the US do both, and nobody says "OpenAI can't compete so they do lobbying" or "Anthropoic can't compete so they do lobbying".

New comment by laffOr in "How Iran is making a mint from the current war"

laffOr — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 22:17:35 +0000

I was extremely surprised by this figure, so I checked the article and it's not "Renewables already surpass fossil fuel in the energy mix" but "Renewables already surpass fossil fuel in the electricity production" right? This is a massive difference. According to Wikipedia, fossil fuels were about 75% of the energy mix in the UK (to take on example) as late as 2024.

New comment by laffOr in "What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves"

laffOr — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 14:40:17 +0000

Rich people will consume most of the output. This is how life worked for most of the last 10k years, didn't it?

New comment by laffOr in "The MacBook Neo"

laffOr — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 21:05:59 +0000

I never understood why they didn't use the Apple "UI". Where Apple presents fewer models (say N models), and when you select one, each is configurable for screen size/RAM/CPU/whatever (say K picks), yielding N*K possibilities, many Windows laptop sellers present a list of N*K SKUs where you need to triple check what the difference between SKU A and B.

New comment by laffOr in "Claude Code, Claude Cowork and Codex #5"

laffOr — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 07:49:56 +0000

Some Americans think the "democracy" vs "republic" distinction is extremely important, and that "democracy" means something like "tyranny of the majority", hence why it is good that America is not a _democracy_, but a _republic_ or a _democratic republic_.

Some other Americans (there is some overlap) also think that the US is so large and diverse that essentially its States are their own countries and the US is more like its own continent, and talking about the American _nation_ or even _country_ is meaningless. It is a union of States (though it is rare that someone argues that the US is not a country).

New comment by laffOr in "We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain risk"

laffOr — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 12:01:22 +0000

Some people feel that mass surveillance is wrong whether it is domestic or not. For those people, being ok with mass surveillance as long that it is not done to your kind is a morally wrong stance.

New comment by laffOr in "We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain risk"

laffOr — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 11:51:14 +0000

> What we have found: the model has strong internal constraints against harmful actions (consistently refuses things it flags as problematic), but the harder risk is subtler -- it can get into loops where it takes many small individually-reasonable actions that compound into something the operator did not intend.

Interestingly this has been well anticipated by Asimov's laws of robotics, decades ago. Drawing the quote from Wikipedia:

> Furthermore, he points out that a clever criminal could divide a task among multiple robots so that no individual robot could recognize that its actions would lead to harming a human being

>Asimov, Isaac (1956–1957). The Naked Sun (ebook). p. 233. "... one robot poison an arrow without knowing it was using poison, and having a second robot hand the poisoned arrow to the boy ..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics#cite_no...

New comment by laffOr in "Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston"

laffOr — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 12:16:12 +0000

It feels like people accept this criticism when it props up their position - for an American (software) engineer, companies run by _American engineers_ vs companies run by American non-engineers is an obvious case of engineering is better (see criticism of Boeing); but when it's Chinese engineer vs American non-engineer, the "American" bit is more important.

New comment by laffOr in "The only moat left is money?"

laffOr — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 21:21:49 +0000

Yes, but this is simply the remnants of the old tailor occupation, post automation. The talented old lady would have had a lot more business in clothes making in the past, no need for a wash & fold.

New comment by laffOr in "There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming (2024)"

laffOr — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 21:18:19 +0000

There is no need for ordering right? All countries can start acting at the same time.

New comment by laffOr in "The only moat left is money?"

laffOr — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:11:50 +0000

Being a tailor is scalable, that's way there are way, way more cheap machine produced clothes today than in the past. Surely he did not miss that the textile industry was at the core of industrial revolution. So being a tailor is more like a post-scaling job - the automation has already happened and now there are only remnants left.

But how can you be sure a job is peak-automated? A few years ago, I would have said musicians are post-scaling - way fewer musicians jobs now that you can play recorded music. But it looks like generative AI will hit musicians again. Can some of welding be automated? Probably.

New comment by laffOr in "The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline"

laffOr — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 16:25:32 +0000

The college explanation cannot be the full or even the main driver, because countries with free college (+ scholarships) have the same issue. Same for daycare pricing.

New comment by laffOr in "Rice Theory: Why Eastern Cultures Are More Cooperative (2014)"

laffOr — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 13:58:16 +0000

Meh. A hundred years ago, TinkerNews commenters would have observed that Western cultures are obviously better at running manufacturing plants, because at the time the West were where manufacturing happened.

New comment by laffOr in "Voxtral Transcribe 2"

laffOr — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 16:25:09 +0000

Don't they have a partnership with the French Armed Forces? I am sure they are interested in automating Russian Audio or Text (-> Russian Text) -> French text.

New comment by laffOr in "Show HN: Only 1 LLM can fly a drone"

laffOr — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 13:04:16 +0000

Definitely maybe - but then we are discussing (2), i.e. "what is the right technical solution to solve (1)".

Your previous comment was arguing that (1) is great (which no one denies in this thread, and it is a different discussion about what products are desirable rather than how to build said product) in an answer to someone arguing (2).

New comment by laffOr in "Show HN: Only 1 LLM can fly a drone"

laffOr — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 16:24:13 +0000

There are two different things:

1. a drone that you can talk to and fly on its own

2. a drone where the flying is controlled by an LLM

(2) is a specific instance of the larger concept of (1).

You make an argument that 1 should be addressed, which no one is denying in this thread - people are arguing that (2) is a bad way to do (1).

New comment by laffOr in "Show HN: Only 1 LLM can fly a drone"

laffOr — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 14:51:24 +0000

You could have a program, not LLM-based but could be ANN, for flying and an LLM for overseeing; the LLM could give the program instructions to the pilot program as a (x,y,z) directions. I mean currently autopilots are typically not LLMs, right?

You describe why it would be useful to have an LLM in a drone to interact with it but do not explain why it is the very same LLM that should be doing the flying.

New comment by laffOr in "On Being a Human Being in the Time of Collapse (2022) [pdf]"

laffOr — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 12:48:48 +0000

Not German so I can only talk about how it is going in another country:

- Massive change in the average household size: way fewer people live together now (delayed couple & family formation, divorce, etc.). If you go from 4 people per household to 2 people per household, now you need twice as many homes.

- Massive internal migration: declining population in a lot of rural areas and increasing in cities & their suburbs. So lot of empty houses and super cheap houses in Dumbfuck, Nowhere but scarce & expensive homes where people want to live.

Ask HN: Trying to find a website featured on HN that listed restaurants in NYC

laffOr — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 12:27:42 +0000

Here's a niche request: last year I stumbled upon a personal website on HN, for a topic related to tech. The website also had a section on NYC, mostly Asian, restaurants that was great. I'm trying to find it again but to no avail. The design was fairly minimalist. Does it ring a bell to any one?

I have tried using the API to get all unique URLs on HN for last year, then crawling the websites to find pages matching relevant keywords but to no avail.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46615249

Points: 15

# Comments: 1

New comment by laffOr in "O-Ring Automation"

laffOr — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 09:07:40 +0000

Completely unrelated. Laffer curve is total tax returns as a function of tax rate (usually used to show that at some point T = t*Y(t), where t is the rate and Y is the taxe base, dT/dt < 0).

This is about how Y works, not as a function of t but of, well, everything else.